The Henson Journals

[134]

Wednesday, January 26th, 1921.

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I paid my reckoning, and left the Station Hotel, travelling comfortably to London by the 10.7 a.m. express which brought me into King's Cross at 2.20 p.m. I occupied the time in reading the Report of the 1st Anglo–Catholic Conference. The tone of arrogance curiously larded with "unction" is extremely offensive to me, and the mental & moral obliquity involved in the whole position is very depressing. The whole teaching of the Church of England is not so much denied as ignored. Another & a superior authority – the "undivided Church" – is postulated, & this is identified with the Church before the formal breach between East & West in 1054. Thus the most barbarous & corrupted epoch of Christian History is included. Everything that can be shown to have been believed & practised then is binding on the modern Church. "Now I ask you candidly," asks Dr Frere. "Do we at present, as we should, hold fast ourselves to whatever East & West hold in common?" I reply for myself, 'we are learning to do so'. But for many of us Anglo–Catholics, there is a great deal still to be learnt." If this binding tradition of ancient oecumenical faith and practice had been authoritatively formulated, we should at least know the whole extent of our danger, but, as matters stand, everyman is free to dig in the limitless quarry of antiquity, & to settle for himself what merits his reverent acceptance as "Catholick"!

[135] [symbol]

I drove at once to Park Lane, where I was kindly welcomed by mine host & hostess. I walked to the Athenaeum, & had tea. Gamble was there, & both the Archbishops. I had some talk with Hadow: & wrote to George. Then later I dined at the Club with Pearce, who is very cheerful.

Gore is a very positive and inflammatory orator. His speech at the A.C. Conference on "the Church & Social & Industrial Problems" was a curiously vehement & unbalanced performance. He made his audience rise "in assent to" his statement of "their duty to stand for the moral Christian principle of sexual purity & the indissolubility of holy matrimony." "We have to stand unflinchingly for the law of indissoluble matrimony as the law for Christians, the law which must govern Church communion." Yet the Eastern Church has ever permitted divorce. Ancient authority counts for nothing with our "Anglo–Catholics" when it conflicts with their policy. Gore denounced "the hideous injustice in principle as well as in practice of our whole commercial & industrial system." I wonder whether he ever seriously asks himself what the effect of his denunciations may be; whether he ever inquires what working substitute there is available for the system which he is seeking to destroy: whether he ever thinks it necessary to condition his ethical fervour by any practical considerations. For there are 46,000,000 in the British Isles to be kept alive somehow!

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